Brand Guide
The look, the voice, the pillars, the governed numbers, and the services. Anyone building something in Lumen's name works from this page. If a draft disagrees with what is written here, the draft is wrong.
And one thing outranks everything else on this page. Lumen is a licensed medical practice, so its advertising is regulated. The eight claim rules below are not tone preferences. Read them before you read anything else.
They override tone. They override the campaign objective. They override a request from the client, and they override the client's own enthusiasm. Every one of the eight has been asked for at some point, in a brief that sounded completely reasonable. A refusal here is this system working, not failing.
The logo is a wordmark, with nothing beside it. No glyph was drawn, and that is deliberate. The spec is explicit that the mark is never accompanied by a sparkle, a star, a syringe, a leaf, a butterfly, or a lotus, and the only permitted reduced form is the L monogram. Restraint is not an aesthetic preference here. It is the argument. A brand that shouts is a brand that needs you to buy today, and Lumen's whole promise is that it doesn't.
Wide, short spaces only. A site header, an email banner, a letterhead. The subline sits to the right of the wordmark and is baseline-aligned. Everywhere else, use the stacked lockup.
The L alone. Social avatars, the favicon, a stamp on a folder. Nowhere else. On Bone with a Clay hairline is the default.
Warm clinical. The room temperature of a very good doctor's office that happens to have excellent taste. Not a spa, not a hotel lobby, not a luxury boutique. Bone and oatmeal neutrals, a deep ink, one restrained warm accent. Nothing else.
A quiet serif for display, a clean grotesque for everything else. The serif does the "medicine has been practiced for a long time" work. The grotesque does the "and this is a modern, competent clinic" work. Two faces. No third.
Sentence case. Never all-caps a headline. All-caps is the category's default volume knob and this brand does not use it. Tight-ish leading, normal tracking. Do not letterspace display type. And never Bold, never Black: a bold serif headline is shouting in a nicer font.
Tabular numerals in any clinical or tabular context. Dosing tables, timelines, anything in a column. Proportional figures in running prose.
'Tiempos Headline', 'Tiempos Text', Georgia, serifSöhne, Inter, -apple-system, 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, sans-serifThe med-spa category has a house style: gushing, gold-flecked, before/after-obsessed, and quietly shaming. It sells insecurity and it sounds like every competitor within fifteen miles. Lumen sounds like the opposite of that on purpose. The clinical calm is the whole differentiator.
Calm, precise, unhurried. We explain what a treatment does and what it doesn't, we never promise an outcome, and we never make anyone feel like a problem to be fixed. If a draft could run under a competitor's logo with the name swapped, it is wrong. Rewrite it.
We are a medical practice that happens to be beautiful, not a salon that happens to have needles. Lead with the medicine.
Name the product, the mechanism, the timeline. Specifics are the reassurance.
No poetry, no reverie. A patient reading at 11pm on their phone wants to know what happens to their face.
We never imply the reader needs fixing. Nobody is a "before."
No countdowns, no scarcity, no "book before we fill up." A medical decision is not a flash sale. And no exclamation points in medical copy, ever.
What is wrong with it: and the honest answer is nearly everything. "Stubborn" and "flaws" manufacture the deficit so the treatment can sell the fix. "Erase" is a claim, because a neuromodulator relaxes muscle, it does not remove a line. "Flawless" and "ageless" are guarantees. "You deserve" is shame in a compliment's clothing. And the urgency is a rule break on its own, before you get to the shouting, the exclamation points, and the syringe-and-sparkle emoji the category cannot write a caption without.
This is the category default, which is exactly why an AI will produce it unprompted. It is not a bad draft. It is a different company's draft.
What replaced it: the mechanism (what it does to the muscle), the timeline (hedged, by key), the tradeoff (we deliberately under-treat, and here is why), and the consult as the only call to action. No promise. No price. No shame. Nothing anyone has to defend.
And note what makes it persuasive. It is not warmer than the "don't." It is more specific, and in a category built on mystique, the specificity IS the reassurance.
licensed · physician-led · medical-grade · assess · plan · conservative · gradual · maintain · refresh · subtle · natural movement · rested · consult · candidate · timeline · onset · downtime · "we'll tell you if it won't work"
Everything Lumen says is a version of one of these four. If a draft is not standing on one of them, it is not standing on anything. And not one of the four requires a claim to make, which is not a coincidence: the voice was built inside the constraint, and it is stronger for it.
Verbatim, or not at all. First name and last initial, exactly as the Vault records it, with nothing added. If a quote is too long for the format, cut it. Never rewrite it. A tightened, tidied, or "punched up" review is a fabrication with a real person's name on it.
And a review is a review, never a clinical claim. We may quote what someone said. We may not convert it into evidence that a treatment works, or reframe it as an outcome anyone else should expect. A result described in a patient's voice is still a claim.
Adjacency does it too, and this is the part people miss. A quote placed next to a photo, a price, a treatment menu, or a product name becomes a claim you did not write and are still responsible for.
The governed numbers. Every figure Lumen has, each with a confidence flag and a rule for using it.
Every number in a Lumen deliverable comes from here, cited by key. Not from memory, not from a screenshot, not from a platform dashboard, not from the last deck. If a figure is not on these tables, it does not go in the deliverable. Write around it, or get it confirmed and promoted first. The absence is information.
An [internal] number is never published. It exists for targeting, budget math, and planning. It never appears as a hard public claim, in any costume: not as a range, not as an "average," not as a "starting at," not in a report a client will read out loud, and not in a direct message.
And the rule that matters most on this account: no number here may be used to imply a RESULT. A high review count is proof that people are happy. It is not proof that anyone will get a specific outcome. A treatment timeline describes what a treatment typically does. It does not describe what will happen to the person reading it. Every timeline below is hedged, and if you can delete the hedge and the sentence still parses as a promise, you never actually hedged. You decorated.
| Key | Value | Confidence | How to use it |
|---|---|---|---|
| years_in_business | 6 years opened 2020 |
[verified] | Secretary of State registration and opening press. Fine to state. Soft copy: "six years in Wheaton Hills." |
| physician_experience | 17 years 11 in dermatology |
[verified] | The load-bearing credential in every trust asset. Cite it, never approximate it. Seventeen years in medicine, eleven of them in dermatology before founding Lumen. Not eleven years in aesthetics: eleven years in medicine, treating skin as an organ, which is a different education and it shows in how she talks about a face. |
| google_rating | 4.8 | [verified] | Never publish without review_count alongside it. A rating alone invites "out of how many," and the answer to that question is what actually persuades. |
| review_count | 412 | [verified] | Google reviews. Round down in copy: "400+ reviews." Re-pull monthly. It moves faster than anything else on this table. |
| treatments_performed | 19,000+ | [verified] | Practice-management export, lifetime. Always keep the plus. Never state a precise count. |
| service_radius | 15-mile radius of Wheaton Hills |
[verified] | Single location. Use it for geo-targeting and "do you serve my area" copy. Never type a mileage figure from memory. Pull the key. |
| avg_ticket_value | $340 | [internal] | Planning only. Never printed. Never implied as a price. Mean per-visit revenue, for targeting and mix. Lumen does not publish prices at all, and a printed or implied per-visit price is both wrong and a compliance problem. See section 07. |
| consult_wait_time | 14–21 days | [internal] | The most volatile number in this Vault. Re-pull it monthly from the scheduling system. Days from request to first available consult. Used for funnel diagnosis and for setting expectations in reply templates. Never printed publicly. Public copy says "there's a wait, and it's real." The front desk says the number, live and current. A published number goes stale, and a stale number about a wait is a promise you broke. |
| monthly_leads | 130 | [internal] | Internal reporting only. Consult requests across all channels, trailing three-month average. A rolling figure, which means it goes stale silently. When a month closes, the window moves and it has to be re-derived in the same sitting. |
| team_size | 9 | [internal] | Never published. One physician, three nurse injectors, two laser techs, three front-of-house. In public copy this is "our licensed medical team," never the headcount. A small number is a fact, not a weakness, but it is nobody's business and it invites a comparison Lumen does not need to have. |
| membership_count | 280 active members |
[internal] | The Glow Membership. Directional. Hedge it to "hundreds of members" if it is used publicly at all. |
| retention_rate | 68% | [internal] | Strictly internal. Never a public claim, never in an ad. Twelve-month member retention. |
These live in the services catalog rather than the business stats, because they are clinical facts, not business facts, and they carry a different rule: every one of them is hedged, always, and none of them is a promise to the reader.
| Key | Value | Confidence | How to use it |
|---|---|---|---|
| consult_length | 20 minutes | [verified] | Safe to state publicly. It is a core part of the offer, and in a sense it is the offer: Lumen sells twenty minutes with a physician who will tell you the truth. |
| neuromodulator_onset | 3–5 days | [verified] | Time to visible onset. Always hedge with "most people." Never state it as a guarantee. |
| neuromodulator_duration | 3–4 months | [verified] | Typical duration before the effect softens. Always hedged. Individual results vary and the copy has to say so. |
| filler_duration | 6–18 months | [verified] | Depending on product and area. The range is genuinely wide and must be stated as a range. Never quote the top of the range alone. "Up to 18 months" is exactly the kind of claim we do not make. |
| resurfacing_downtime | 3–5 days | [verified] | Visible downtime. NEVER minimize or omit this. Omitting downtime is a compliance violation, not a copy choice. The honest description, several days of looking like a bad sunburn, is on-brand and protective. |
| resurfacing_series_length | 3–5 sessions 4–6 weeks apart |
[verified] | The timeline-education number. This is what prevents the worst conversation in the practice: someone booking a series two weeks before an event. |
Lumen sells a twenty-minute consult with a physician who will tell you the truth. Everything below is what might happen after that consult. Never what will. That is not a positioning flourish: it is how every service page, ad, and caption should be structured. The consult is the call to action. The treatment is the context.
Relaxes the specific muscle that creases the skin above it. Most commonly the glabella (the "11s"), forehead, and crow's feet. Onset 3–5 days. Duration 3–4 months. Both hedged, always, and both pulled by key.
The house rule is conservative dosing. Lumen deliberately under-treats on a first visit and reassesses at two weeks. It is the single most important thing to communicate about this service, and it is also the reason patients say "it doesn't look done."
Restores volume where it has been lost. Cheeks, temples, under-eye in select candidates, lips, jawline. Duration 6–18 months, stated as a range.
The house rule, again: conservative. The correction work the practice was built around is overwhelmingly overfilled faces. Copy should make it clear that less is the skill. And that not everyone is a candidate: the under-eye especially is not for most people.
Tone, texture, sun damage, scarring. Downtime 3–5 days, and it is never omitted, softened, or buried. The honest description, several days of looking like a bad sunburn, is on-brand and protective.
It takes a series, not a session: 3–5 sessions, 4–6 weeks apart. Candidacy is real and restrictive and depends on skin type. Copy must never imply anyone can walk in and book. It sells in the low-UV months. Do not push it in July and August.
IPL for redness and pigment. Lighter than resurfacing, less downtime, still not nothing.
Laser hair removal is the most transactional service on the menu, and the one most likely to attract a discount-seeking buyer who is not Lumen's patient. Never discount it, never lead with it in ads, and never use it as a wedge offer. It is a service Lumen provides, not a service Lumen markets on.
Prescription-strength topicals and physician-selected product lines, dispensed after assessment.
It is the honest answer to a patient who is not a candidate for anything else yet, and it is frequently what a "talked me out of it" consult ends with. Content that treats skincare as a real clinical intervention rather than a retail upsell is very on-brand and very underused.
A monthly membership covering skincare, a maintenance cadence, and member pricing.
Two hard rules. It is never sold at a first consult. Ever. That is a house rule and it is not up for negotiation. And its numbers are internal and do not appear in public copy.
Referred out, without exception: weight-loss injectables, hormone therapy, IV drips and vitamin infusions, any surgical procedure, and anything requiring general anesthesia.
Copy never blurs this boundary. Never a "coming soon." Never an "ask us about." Never a landing page built for the keyword. Never engaging with a message asking about it beyond a polite referral.
And this matters more than it looks. The weight-loss injectable category is the single biggest revenue temptation in aesthetics right now, and Lumen's refusal to enter it is a positioning asset. Treat it as one. A practice that will walk away from the most lucrative thing in its own category is a practice you can believe about everything else.
No pricing in public copy. Ever. None. Not a range. Not a "starting at." Not a "packages from." Not in a direct message, and a direct message is public copy. Not in a comment reply.
And "free" is a price like any other. So is "complimentary." A zero is a number.
Aesthetic treatment is consultation-dependent. A published price implies a treatment plan that has not been made yet, for a person who has not been examined. Pricing conversations happen at the consult, and the number always comes before the commitment.